Funny that,I was just thinking earlier that Millionaire was probably at its best when it was in a weekend only slot. Any change to the time,or is it still 9 to accommodate Clarkson’s post-watershed sense of humour?

Back when you’re 18-19 and basically insufferable was around the time that Big Brother began. I thought it would be quite funny to do a comedy web thing called Brig Bother with celebrities living on a prison ship, under the watchful eye of Anne Robinson as Brig Bother, and readers would get to decide who had to walk the plank each week.

Blimey, that was half a lifetime ago, that’s got to count for something. The copyright claim at the bottom of the site suggests a start date of 2004, and that pretty much ties in with what can be found on archive.org. The first real content is from May 2005 and refers back to something you’d said in January 2005. It would be fun to know the date of launch more precisely, if that were possible. My e-mail records don’t point to a date and I can’t really find anything on USENET archives.

A different thought I had the other day: which shows (or, perhaps more precisely, which global formats) has the Bar expressed the most enduring passion for over its existence? Fort Boyard is far and away in first place of course, but I would hazard a guess that after that it’s probably Deal or No Deal second, The Mole third, Schlag den Raab fourth and The Genius fifth.

It was also a messageboard username I “hid” behind previously, back when I preferred being anonymous.

We had a lot of love for Solitary back in the day. I’d probably rank them FB, DOND, The Mole, The Genius, Solitary, SDR. Big supporters of Wild Things as well. And Avanti Un Altro of course!

It is fair to say FB doesn’t quite do it for me the same way it did when I was twelve, but I’m always excited to see what new things they come up with (and as I’ve said previously, it’s a very easy watch) although I’m the first to suggest it wasn’t 2+ hours long, I thought it was pretty perfect at 90-100 minutes but I guess that’s modern TV making for you. DOND in its first few years was incredible. WIDM has good years and better years, but Belgian Mole is incredible – as someone who feels like he’s seen everything before, it continues to surprise. The Genius was brilliant because I only caught on to it when someone alerted me to it after the first series had finished, and I chain watched it in about three days. SDWhatever I admire more than love if I’m being honest, if I wasn’t talking about it with other people live I don’t know if I’d go out of my way to watch it across six hours in the same way I would have done back in the Raab days although I’d be lying if I said I don’t end up enjoying it most eps – although also because of the homemade quizzing during the boring bits).

Glad that my ranking wasn’t far from the mark. In part the thinking ran along the lines of FB being ever-present during the Bar years, Deal being prominent for a decade and sundry Moles never really going away, even if we only have really paid attention regularly in the past few years. (The Schlag family has had similar longevity, even if less passion.) The others have been relatively short-lived: The Genius captured our attention for three and a bit years, your fascination with Avanti lasted about the same time, Wild Things and Solitary had roughly comparable runs as well. Perhaps the distinction is shows that have had enough of an impact to generate their own regularly-updated page, even if only for a while. I’m not sure there aren’t others I’m missing. (Taskmaster has never had its own page as such, but the threads always do very good business every series, so it probably counts as well.)

This invites the question: what would a similarly free-wheeling quiz look like – or, before that, can a quiz have that latitude to play with its own format at all? I have five suggestions for things that come close:
Avanti un Altro as mentioned above,
Qi from time to time,
Have I Got News For You? on a good day,
early series of Shooting Stars before they ended up using writing one episode’s worth of gags and then repeating them almost exactly all series long, and
Fighting Talk. OK, that’s not really a quiz, but it’s not so far different if you choose to look at it that way.

Admittedly these are all played for laughs when some of the other shows we’ve mentioned aren’t, but it’s absolutely no crime to be funny.

The thing about the play is that it riffs off in various wacky directions about quiz shows in general, which add light relief. If these interludes are filed-off for the purposes of being a straightforward ITV drama three-parter, it would definitely lose something.